Back in the 1977, when I lived in Romania, I bought a few notebooks and started a journal. Typewriters were rare, but even if you were able to find one, you had to register it at the local police station. For years, I hid my writings in a sack of salt, in my parents' pantry. Several thousand pages later, The Salt Diaries has become an artistic laboratory, a source for my mixed media artwork, photography, and fiction, including my novel Reliquary. In 2003, it became the basis for Brian Kamerzel's documentary film, The Art of Leaving.

In 2010, musician Martin Meyer started working on a concept music album based on The Salt Diaries. It is a creative collaboration I am extremely proud of.

Twyla Tharp once said that "talent is a way of saying thank you." I guess that all my creative efforts, whatever they are worth, have been exactly just that-a deep bow of gratitude to the world around me.

The CD is now available. To obtain a copy of the CD, please email me through this site or check out Amazon, CDBaby, and Napster websites for electronic downloads.

Here are the fragments that inspired the music.

One: An American Journal

In Romania, I kept my notebooks hidden in a storage room, in a sack of salt. In 1990, after arriving in the United States, I started learning English and made my first attempts at writing in my new language. "The Salt Diaries" became an American journal.

I am terrified by the idea of writing in a language that is not my own. How could I think or write in English? Which part of myself do I have to give up? Is thinking and feeling in a different language a type of prostitution?

When I was a child, I used to receive postcards from a stranger who always signed them "Your unknown friend." I later discovered that the sender was one of my father's friends. Knowing that I liked images and colors, my father bought a lot of stamps and asked him to send me a card every time he traveled. For me, that little gesture opened up the taste for imagining the world. Later on, when I had a chance to meet him, I refused. It was better that way, not knowing.

Both reading and writing are signs of unhappiness and discomfort. Happiness is the enemy of creativity. The Bible doesn't tell us, but God probably created the world because he was lonely and unhappy. If we would be happy, books and symphonies would be purposeless. How many times has reading or writing kept people from committing a crime? How many times did people use a pen or a brush because they couldn't pull the trigger?

Two: To Be Understood

It is not enough to be loved. You have to be understood.

I should go through this part of my life the way I go through the book I am unable to read: keep reading it, even if you don't understand a word.

I wish I had a grave for my parents. Not knowing where they are buried, I am obligated to carry their graves within me all the time. I am a mobile cemetery.

I realize that I have been writing in here nearly every day. What if I actually try to write in here every day for the rest of my life? How many days are left?

I've long ceased believing that the body is a safe place.

What if all reality is virtual?

It is not enough to be loved. You have to be understood.

A temporary double death in front of a mirror: You close your eyes, and both of you vanish.

Nostalgia is a form of paralysis.

How would the world look if everything were equally significant, if everything were worth remembering?

Every poem or painting or dance is an attempt to stop the clock.

It is not enough to be loved. You have to be understood.

Three: Paying Attention

Making art is like falling in love blindfolded. When you paint or write, you hug the air, trying to give form to what stands between you and the world. You want to be heard. You imagine an audience. Every work of art is a message in a bottle thrown into the sea. You hope, someday, someone will pick it up. Most of the time, the artist is a sailor on a sinking ship. He has to spread his message around before his ship goes down.

The ritual of boarding a plane... A beautiful, blonde, middle-aged flight attendant whose legs I admire every time she passes by; the video showing how to use your floating device, your oxygen mask, etc. The subtle noises from the hidden belly of this steel whale: testing the wings, the air circulation, the seatbelts being clicked on, the dimming of the overhead lights. A large, flat TV screen showing mind-numbing purple images of waterfalls, flowers, lakes. How many of us in the plane, right now, are thinking about death?

What I want to do in my work: a reverse archeology. Bury myself under many layers so I can unearth myself again and again. I am both the archaeological site and the archaeologist.

Write a poem with a black permanent marker on a light-green or yellow apple. A love poem. Let the apple decay. Let the poem decompose. Take photographs.

At the gas station, an elderly woman with a brand-new silver Mercedes. She is trying to pump gas and asks me for help. Is this the first time she has been out on her own? It seems that she doesn't even know how to make a call from a public phone. Is she well-off, or maybe ill? It's much easier to imagine her as wealthy rather than the victim of a medical condition. One of the disadvantages of being rich: sometimes you are cut off from the most elementary routines.

On love: a New York lawyer, Burt Pugach, hired three thugs to blind his ex-girlfriend. (This was in 1959.) The lawyer spent 14 years in jail, and when he got out, he asked his ex-girlfriend to marry him. She said yes.

This journal: just a way of paying attention.

Four: Kept Secret

Sometimes I believe that the best part of our lives is what we keep secret, that the best stories are those never told, the best images are those we never see.

Dear God: On what basis do you blindfold me, asking me to follow You? Of course, there are chances that I will be saved, that when You remove the veil from my eyes, I will see differently and discover new, marvelous worlds. But there is always the possibility that when I open my eyes, what I see will be the grim faces of a firing squad. I have spent a big part of my life knowing dictators, not saviors, therefore You should understand my proclivity toward the firing squad rather than the afterlife.

Sometimes I believe that the best part of our lives is what we keep secret, that the best stories are those never told, the best images are those we never see.

Under these layers of smoke, there is more guilt than hope. The saints look tired of wearing make-up. If we don't turn the lights on, would they disappear? The church, inhabited by saints like an old apartment taken over by Gypsies. Let's leave. Maybe the saints will make a fire in the middle of the floor, and warm their hands.

Five: Memories of You

Maybe there isn't such a thing as the Past, the Present, and the Future, but rather one compact entity, incorporating the three of them. We are just incapable of perceiving it. That's all.

Your memories of me, my memories of you, fading the way trees, cars and people become gradually smaller after a plane takeoff.

Six: Reality

The dismissal of reality. The world becomes more and more artificial. We want to be "rescued" by virtual realities because we can't face the "real" reality; this explains the popularity of all sorts of games in the modern world. The Greeks glorified the body in its spiritual relationship with the mind; we glorify the body as a tool, a carcass, and a shell, in a false independence from everything. The modern body has divorced any type of morality because it selfishly wants to become its own ethos. Maybe pleasure is the only thing we have left.

Seven: Blessing and Curse

Last night, strolling around SoHo. Sad, derelict, dead. Safe haven for the rich. Potholes. Piles of large, transparent garbage bags. Alien trees. The only safety is behind the dark doors of the bars. Calvin Klein. Plastic, headless bodies. Why do we still need bras and bikinis in this world, where everything is aimed at taking them off? Nothing sacred, nothing new. Copies of copies of copies. If someone would steal Venus from the Louvre and place her in the large window of the store across from this restaurant, would anyone notice it?

My eyes hurt from so much thinking...I think with my eyes. My blessing and my curse.

Would the world be a much richer place with everything out in the open? A world in which every life is a blend of talk show, confessional and operating room? Definitely not. There is so much mystery in the unknowing, in the guessing games, in choice and the freedom to ignore choice (which is a choice on its own.)

Eight: Scattered Maps

My scattered maps: my first bath; a motorcycle accident at the age of 5; living inside my head; books; gardens; hiking trips; sex in a tent in winter; my mother telling stories by my bedside; setting my toy cars on fire; the first kiss; birthday candles; my father in prison; my parents making love; potting soil; Santa Claus; almost drowning; my mentor's art studio in Bucharest; fluid lightning snakes over gargantuan boulders in the Carpathians during a rain storm; Madonna's "Live to Tell" in the airplane bringing me from Rome to America; my mother's funeral; the stain left by her body on her mattress; my father's coffin on our dining room table; 5 amazing years with H: America 101; reading Hemingway in original; sleeping in my parents' car during summer nights; crying in front of a Van Gogh, my first time at the Metropolitan Museum; the car I won on my 6th birthday; children playing soccer with a soldier's severed head on my street after the fall of communism; first day in school as a student; first day in school as a teacher; D.'s death; first sold painting; Paris.

Nine: Madison Avenue

I traced your perfume on Madison Avenue-a smoky ribbon of rose, mandarin, patchouli, vanilla, jasmine, and stainless steel, hot and cool like a furtive kiss in a graffiti-covered entry way to your heart. I started running after the bus I saw you boarding, your perfume still flowing like a shawl above the putrid snow, your perfume leaving traces in the cold like a rainbow snowplow. I thought it was a regular bus you took and not this Woodstock Ark of cheerful couples holding hands, looking into each other's eyes, two and two and two more, and I thought that no one could get in alone, that there are always rules, but no one asked you for your passport or even a password: your charm got you in.

The bus was picking up speed. You took a window seat. You kissed a stranger whose face I couldn't see because the city was reflecting its live makeup in the moving glass. Inside, it must have been warm. Outside, I felt the snow melting into my shoes like a flood of cold, oily blood. It was getting dark, but I could see Noah, wearing a Yankees baseball cap, giving me the finger, as he drove his Ark into the night.

10: Places and Knives

Europe's cafes are fuller than its churches. The stage has shifted; the street is the cathedral now. God seems to be harder to find these days. If you look carefully, He could hide in the child playing with a thirsty dog at a table across me, or in the old beggar covered with tattoos, waiting by the ATM machine, on the marble steps leading to the front door of the cathedral.

In Denver, on a street famous for its drug dealers and prostitution, the local merchants got together and decided to do something about it. They started playing classical music-especially opera- on that street, through outdoor speakers, and....it worked. Only in America classical music as a cure for prostitution!

I stopped by an estate sale in the center of New Hartford-at an old, large, messy house. I had the sense that I was violating the place, going through the stuff that filled the rooms. Clothes in bathtubs, dusty Christmas ornaments, a kitchen in disarray, furniture and stained pillows, rugs and cardboard boxes. Stuck on the refrigerator, a color photograph of two elderly people, most likely the former owners of the house, smiling. The picture was taken in the house, in one of the rooms, when the house was a home. The only place where the feeling of home survived was on that small piece of shiny paper.

I left the place with a set of old French kitchen knives.

To live within the absence of love. To live apart from the love of your life. To obey society's rules. To be afraid. To have missed your chance at being loved until you die. To realize that this idea is not a fantasy.

11: Something Real

After death, our ashes turn into food climbing up their vital arteries. With the honor and humility of being mixed with the body of the planet, our bodies turn into bread. The breast of the mother helping her children grow, later the ashes of the same breast helping the grass rise.

When I arrived here, my hopes were just a suitcase filled with Monopoly money. My past was my twin brother. It's more to me that just being soldered to my memories, I thought. The city was giant eraser trying to help.

What I need is something real. I should try creating still lifes using words as objects.

Why not? A word could have the same materiality as a tri-dimensional object. Is there a stronger reality in words than in images? Could we even think about the world without words or images? And if in the beginning it was the word, which word was it? I know, I know: maybe the first word was an exclamation in front of an image (God creating light, and seeing that it was good).

I picture words lined up on my square coffee table like a collection of lead soldiers from my childhood, waiting for my orders. I could line them up, or arrange them in a radial design, a Stonehenge of vowels and consonants, an altar built with words. I could hide them in my pockets, or I could wipe them off the table with a quick gesture. I could let them escape, or I could crush them. I could selfishly bury them so no one would find them for a while, or I could set them on fire.

How would a three-dimensional word feel? I try to imagine myself walking through or around a word. How would the word flower smell? How would the word green taste?

How could I pull God out of my question marks?

12: A Woman Will

The woman who will bring you life. The woman who will bring you joy. The woman who will bring you companionship. The woman who will betray you. The woman who will play with you. The woman who will take your soul away. Equally vital.

13. The Communists Didn't Have Enough Time

Great idea for a poem: thousands of anonymous gazes floating invisibly in front of a painting. The ability to channel that energy equals the ability to understand the work. Also, "what looks at us does not always see us."

The people who came to embalm my father: taxidermists. My father's body, like a dead, cotton filled bird.

And even if you did all the dying by yourself, who is there to witness it?

This country, where objects last longer than people.

I am still too young to survive only on a diet of memories.

Thank God that the communists didn't have time to invent a thought-reading machine.

The written word became a weapon to me.

Books intimidate and words could kill.

Books intimidate and words could kill

My revenge, besides saving my own sanity, was to want to save everything. It was also the belief that simply mentioning an illness could cure it.

Winter: my soul hibernates and my body leaves and there is not much room left for joy.

Photography: a form of embalming.

14: Why I Refuse

This journal: just a way of paying attention. Understanding what? This journal: just a way of paying attention.

A large wooden sign above a garage in Canton: "WE BELIEVE IN SANTA CLAUS." It sounds almost political.

My college students: a different type of audience. Every time you teach, you perform. You are trying, somehow, to connect with your audience. And never forget that you are only a man with a flashlight.

Worth remembering: just a way of paying attention. This journal: just a way of paying attention. This journal: just a way of paying attention.

Adam and Eve were kicked out of Paradise too early. They did not have time to experience everything that it had to offer them. What if they had been allowed to stay for many years, until old age. Being kicked out of Paradise much later, when in their eighties, would have been devastating. But punishment came to them too early. Despair? Of course! Shock? You bet. Yet, they still had something to look forward to. Life was possible outside Paradise. The sense of loss is always accentuated by how much experience precedes it. How much you love before love is gone is what matters.

I rarely bought gifts for my parents when they were alive. I wish I could do it now. I love Peter Weir's idea in Fearless: buying presents for the dead; everything that you think they might have liked or wanted, buy it now, even if they are not around anymore.

Painting is doing a good deed. With every painting, I hope that my sins will be forgiven.

Cioran believes that every human being should live and die where he was born. Could you even imagine that? Maybe that is why I refuse to return to Romania: afraid that by returning, I might die in my past.

Fragments from The Salt Diaries have been published first in the fall 2008 issue of FragLit Magazine, an international literary magazine of fragmentary writing sponsored by Impassio Press, and in Andrei Codrescu's Exquisite Corpse.